


Crow

by Dragoncurl



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Body Modification, Extremely Dubious Consent, Gen, Mild Gore, POV Outsider, Transformation, but he seems fine with it afterward, i mean you cant consent if youre dead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-01
Updated: 2019-05-01
Packaged: 2020-02-15 16:15:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18673132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dragoncurl/pseuds/Dragoncurl
Summary: The Outsider doesn't want to let go of his favorite Marked. The way he shows it is... let's call it Problematic.





	Crow

Corvo Attano is dead.

Please, do not cry. All things die, sooner or later. Even I, God of the Void that I am, will one day perish. It is an immutable fact of existence, be it the mundane kind that my old Marked just left or the more immaterial variety found here in the Void. Just as all things have a beginning, so too must they come to an end.

In any case, he is dead. He lies before me now, on a simple slab of obsidian. He's still handsome, even in death, I think. His hair never quite went fully white, there are still some few, stubborn strands clinging to the dark brown that used to paint his whole scalp. His face and features have lost a lot of the edge they once held, but they still hold all the kindness he was always capable of. He looks peaceful. Asleep, almost, were it not for the undeniable lack of red behind the Serkonan brown of his skin.

Would you like to know how it happened? No no, don't answer. I know you would. There is not much to tell, truthfully. I just saw it happen and it was quite boring, I assure you.

He was old. A retired man. His life was fraught with dangers, innumerable encounters that could've spelled his early doom, but he lived through them all. Corvo Attano lived to see an Empress made not once, but twice, he lived for his lover and, when she was so rudely taken from him, for his daughter in secret, and now, at the end of his days, he only lived for the flowers on his windowsill. He always did like tending to them while watching the tides, looking out over the port of Karnaca.

It wasn't an assassin's blade that took his life, but simple human frailty. He went to sleep. A tiny little vein simply...  _ popped _ inside his brain and flooded his skull with blood. He never saw the sunrise. There's no sign of it on the outside as I float above him. A quiet, boring death. Painless, if nothing else. I'm certain Emily will be devastated when she hears the news.

Not of his death, however. That will he assumed, but he will be reported as missing, officially. I  _ have _ just pulled his body into the Void, after all.

I reach out and touch my fingers to his cheek. He's still warm, though it's fading quickly in the inexorable chill of the Void. I pull up one of his eyelids. The pupil underneath doesn't react at all. The eyeball is dry and glassy. Unmoving. I let the lid drop again. I comb a hand through his hair, tidy it carefully in just the way he himself would do were he alive and getting ready for the day.

Before we continue, I must let you in on a small secret.

I tell all my Marked that I have no favorites, but that is a lie. My favorites are few and far between. Corvo is only the third I can safely say rose above the other Marked of his time.

Within those three, I daresay Corvo may have become my  _ most _ favorite throughout my four thousand years of Godly existence.

He is dead, but I intend to make that a lie as well.

I let my hand wander lower. I start to gingerly pluck each button off his shirt. I let the little things drift off into the Void, watch them fade, become translucent, transparent, then nothing at all. The same will happen to Corvo, eventually, if I were to leave him here lying on cold obsidian, but I won't. I take all of his buttons instead, then move him sitting so I can slip his shirt off his shoulders, down his arms, let the Void take it as well.

I lay him back down. There's still some bulk clinging to Corvo's old bones. The Mark kept him strong and lively through the years, well beyond what any regular human would have been able to achieve at such advanced age.

That doesn't matter now though.

I take his hand in mine. The Mark is faded on the back of it, no longer the stark black it once was but dull, diluted into a hazy gray. It flares weakly when I touch a finger to it and trace the curving swoops and sharp straights. I rest the Marked hand on its owner's chest, right over the heart.

There's still so much work to do, but there's no need to rush. I have literally all the time in the world. I pluck the button off his pants and pull the zipper down. I could just make all the clothes disappear, of course, but I find myself wanting to take the less simple route for once. It takes a bit of tugging and pulling, but I work the rest of his clothes off, the pants and underwear and socks, until he is laid bare before me. Only physically, there is no mind for me to leaf through like an open book.

Corvo is my canvas.

I start by laying his hand aside again, so I can have full access to his chest. The obsidian under him falls away. Or perhaps it is he who rises weightless off it? It doesn't really matter. Either way, he hangs now in the air, held by nothing, while my fingers thrum across his cooling skin. I move around him, appraising his body.

My Marked. My favorite. My canvas.

I make a full loop around him and stop in front of him again. My hand is over his heart. My fingers curl into a pinch. I catch a single hair between them, and pull on it. Rather than parting from the skin the hair lengthens, thickens, begins to split apart into tiny fractals under my fingers until it's not hair anymore, but a long black feather. Slow and methodical, I begin to weave the hairs both small and large on his body into a budding coat of feathers.

I spread the black gradually across his chest. Over his shoulders. Around his neck, his upper arms, his biceps, and down to just slightly past the elbow. Then I return to the torso and thread the feathers out further, across his stomach and belly, down his sides, his waist, his hips. Around each thigh and calf, though I stop a little below the knee. I leave his back, his hands and feet, his head all free of the spreading black. For now.

I float back and look over my work so far.

The coat of feathers is silky and shiny, reflecting the diffuse light of the Void. A bit puffed out with no muscle tension to hold them smooth, but thick and with no gaps, at least not where I didn't want them. A perfect start.

I drift close again. I mold my hand to his jaw, feel the edge of the coat of feathers just under the corner. I run my thumb along his cheekbone. He really is handsome, even in death. He will be beautiful when I'm done.

I take his right hand and bring it up between us. I start to knead my fingers into his forearm, flattening the skin into hard disks, weaving and shaping them together to form scales where the feathers stop. I spread the little pieces like an organic puzzle around his arm, down to his wrist, across the back of his hand, but on the palm I also begin to mold the bones into new shapes. I rearrange the metacarpals, elongate them a little, add a bit of padding to the meat of the hand. I make each phalanx, each fingerbone, longer and a bit thicker as I bring the coat of hard scales to each digit. At the tips, I pinch his fingerprint and pull on the nail, willing it to grow longer, to curve and thicken and sharpen into a black talon.

I splay out his new hand when I'm done. Something between avian and human, though still much closer to the second. The feathers end about halfway down his forearm to give way smoothly to the black scales.

I'll spare you the full description, but I do the same to his other hand and to both his feet. On the other arm I weave the scales around the Mark, making sure the pattern is retained not in ink, but in the seams between the scales. The legs need a little more adjusting, I have to change even the femur into a slightly different shape, rearrange the muscles of the thighs and calves to accommodate the more digitigrade stance that will result from the much longer metatarsals and the far more avian talons I mold his feet into.

I pull back once more. His body is almost done. Feathers, scales and claws where there was once frail human skin and blunt rounded nails. The back is still untouched, bare skin amidst the feathers creeping in on all sides. I'll leave it for last.

I cradle his face in my hands again. I reach behind his neck and knead my fingers into his nape, coax the vertebrae to change, just a little bit, to better accommodate what I'll do to his skull. I take his jaw and open his mouth. I pluck out each of his teeth and let them drift away to be lost to the Void; a tiny trickle of blood follows each tooth before it too dissipates into nothing. I bring the feather up over the line of his jaw, across his cheeks and to his mouth. Like clay, I begin to pull and squeeze at the bone, at his nose and the lower half of his face. I extend them as they turn black, the skin gives way to hard, smooth keratin which I mold carefully into a long shape with a sharp tapered point. A crow's beak, but not an ordinary one. When I pry it open it's to add further sharpness, make something like the serrated edge of a sawblade along either side of the beak.

I finish spreading the feathers across the rest of his face. I open his eyes again as I mold them into something a little more avian, spread the iris and shrink the sclera to hide the white. I could change the color, but the rich brown he was born with will work just fine. I place a thumb on the center of his forehead and push it through the bone; it crumbles easily. I open a new socket and place a third eyeball inside, make sure it's the same size and shape and color as the other two, then let all three eyelids drift shut.

He still has his hair. I find myself quite fond of the white. I pluck out each strand of hair until the scalp is bare, but what I replace them with is a crest of feathers along the top and back of his skull, a crest of white peppered with the same dark, lively brown as his eyes.

Which, finally, brings me to his back.

I splay my hands over his shoulder blades. This will be the culmination of my work, it won't be enough to just knead at the flesh through the skin. I trace my fingers along the edge of the feathers and like scalpels the skin comes apart under them. I peel it away, little by little, until the whole breadth of the muscle and bone and sinew across his back is laid bare for me. It's not just the skin, I flay him open muscle by muscle, layer by layer, until his spine and ribs and scapulas are fully exposed. I actually have to move his arms up over his head and peel away the skin and feathers around his sides and chest and even over his shoulders, I realize now I'll have to change more than just his back.

That is still where I start.

My hands move in unison, a perfect mirror of each other. I split each scapula in two and mold the bone into a new shape. I poke at the ribs and rearrange the shoulders a little. I go around to his front to pinch at the sternum, the clavicles, to extend the bone and make room for more mass. I create fresh bone out of Void stuff, two new limbs that I graft onto the second pair of scapulas. When I start to put each layer of muscle back into place I'm also changing the fibers, adding new ones, weaving the already existing flesh into a different configuration. I extend the muscles and multiply them to cover the new limbs, wrap the Void bones in flesh to glue it all together. The skin has to be put back into place in parts as well, so I can wrap it around the base of each new limb and, much like the muscle underneath, extend it out to actually cover said limbs.

I spread the feathers to cover his back, but the ones that I weave onto the new limbs are much different. Not a simple smooth coat, I make them into long pinions. I spend a lot of fine taking special care of them, making sure both limbs are perfectly symmetrical, that the curve of the trailing edge is done well, that each feather slides over the other in just the right way.

The last touch is to bleach their tips with white, and then his brand new wings are finished. I leave them spread wide out to the sides, each longer than he himself is tall.

Only one more thing left to go.

At the base of his spine, I press my palm on his sacrum and pull on it, willing the atrophied coccyx to grow and the muscles to attach to it. I pull the feathers around it longer and fan them out, then fold them in. A tail, to complete the human-avian hybrid that I have built my canvas into.

When I float around to face him again, he really has become beautiful. Still human, mostly, under all the feathers and scales and the beak and the third eye and the wings and tail, but a true work of art. His original body would've wilted and dissipated into the Void, but this one will withstand it for a very long time indeed. Perhaps even forever, if he's careful with it.

There are a few final adjustments.

I comb and smooth out his feathers. I sharpen and lengthen the teeth on the serrated edges of his beak just a little bit more. I polish the beak itself, as well as his scaled hands and feet and his claws. After a moment's thought, I change the later to a gentle, pearly white to match his crest and the tips of his wings. I fold the new pair of limbs and tuck them carefully against his back. With a wave of my hand, a large chunk of obsidian comes up under him and he settles on it, no longer floating weightless.

I float over him.

A flick of the wrist, and a mote of light gathers between my fingers.

His soul. I've been keeping it safe and sheltered from the Void while I worked on his body. It's time to return it.

I lay my other hand on his chest. I will his heart to start beating, his lungs to draw breath, then sink the little bead of misty radiance through the feathers and move backward at a safe distance.

Seconds pass.

I can feel the heartbeat pump faster each time. His synapses spark, tentatively, as oxygen reaches them slowly, then all at once when soul and mind and body finally align into one single entity.

He suddenly startles awake and gasps for air like a drowned man. His wings shoot out in jerky, uneven movements. He flails, caws, panics, rolls onto his side and caws again at the pain of the awkward angle it puts his wing in. It's a mess of ruffled feathers while he moves and shifts and shakes and gasps, but eventually, he stops. I float lazily around the island so I can see his face, watch him touch along the smooth surface of the beak, prod at his third eye, flex his new clawed fingers, move his wings experimentally, try to tuck them in awkwardly, fan out his tail.

When his gaze finally lands on me, he gives an undignified squawk that, even wordless, demands answers. It makes me smile.

" **Hello, my dear. How do you like your new life?** "

He looks down at his hands again, touches his beak, looks back at me. He caws, though he's starting to realize he can probably do more than that.

" **Yes, you died. Peacefully, in your sleep, if you're wondering. And I thought, what a waste it would be to let you simply be carried off and buried, or cremated, or whatever other ritual Emily would see fit to say goodbye to you. So I brought you here. I gave you a body that will never again age, as long as I will it not to.** "

He inspects his claws, then the back of his left hand. He clenches it into a fist. The seams between the scales forming the Mark glow with an inner light. He lets it fade and spreads his wings. They move easier now, smoother. He's adjusting remarkably fast to his new anatomy. He even flaps them a few times, then lets them hang open by his sides.

His beak opens. Something like a shaky, broken syllable makes its way out. He tries a few more times, makes more quasi-human noise, until he figures out how to speak without a mouth. The corners of it can turn up or down in a simile or a smile or a frown respectively, but his beak is unmoving. It's his new vocal chords that create his voice now, them and little else.

"What do you want from me?"

I smile again. " **For you to live, my dear, here in the Void with me. Nothing more. I am the Outsider, and** **_you_ ** **...** " I drift close and cradle his chin in my palm.

" **You will be my Crow.** "


End file.
